Orpheus Girl

by Brynne Rebele-Henry

  Later, when Grammy’s out helping Paul with some kind of ambiguous “church thang,” I climb the rickety stairs to the third floor.

  Sometimes, when Grammy is working, I like to sit in Mom’s room and try to remember things about her. All my memories of her are so hazy that often I think I made them up, but I guess I’ll never know. Before Grammy comes home, I always go through the room and make sure everything is exactly where Mom left it before I slip downstairs, pretend to have been at the dining room table doing my homework.

  Her room is painted pale blue, and there are little baskets filled with Beanie Babies hanging over her bed. She painted clouds on her ceiling so it looks like the sky. Her bed is white, with a pink canopy over it. Then there’s a wooden crib from when she was a baby that Grammy gave her after my birth. There’s a tube of Wet n Wild lipstick in Creative Cranberry on the yellow dresser. There’s also a cracked mirror, a rainbow carpet, and a rocking chair missing an arm, but that’s it.

  After Mom left, Grammy kept the room exactly the same, like a shrine, as if one day Mom would come back and expect everything to be how she left it. Once every couple of months she dusts it, but other than that, the door to her room stays closed.

  I take one of Mom’s smaller cheerleading trophies off the wall and hold it, try to imagine what she was like all those years ago. Sometimes I wonder what things would be like if she’d stayed, if she’d ever gotten a chance to know me.

  After, I go through everything else in the box. I let myself take the picture of us out again, but just for a little bit. In the picture I’d just been born, was nothing more than a little red dot of a baby with a bandage where my vertebrae wings were, and Mom was exhausted but beautiful. Her sunflower-like hair was a messy halo around her tear-stained face. Instead of wearing a hospital gown, she’d brought her own robe: pale pink with red stripes that matched her mouth and her cheeks perfectly.

  When Grammy gave me the photo for the first time, she sighed sadly and said, “You look just like her.” The way she said it, it didn’t sound like a good thing, and the sour tone of her voice stayed with me long after I’d begun to make myself forget about what she’d said.

  Next I take out the empty bottle of her favorite perfume. It’s by Guess, a brand I’ve never seen anywhere except for in the glossy magazines the rich girls at school have. The magazines get passed around, from the popular to the unpopular, until they work their way down to Sarah and me, and by then the clothes will already be out of season. Whenever I look at the girls in the magazines, a strange hunger rises up in my throat: a hunger for the kind of girl I’ll never be.

  Sarah and I never needed to tell each other why we’d pore over those magazines. I always knew that she, too, was researching how straight girls dress and talk, how they arrange their expressions for the camera. Sometimes, without saying anything, she and I would practice their poses in front of the mirror. Hold our hands at a tilt in front of our stomachs like Barbies. Try jutting our hips out and hooking our thumbs through our belt loops, making an expression somewhere between a smile and a snarl. I saw her doing the Barbie wave at church one day, and then I started doing it too.

  Mom’s perfume smells like stale roses and cinnamon, something else smoky and foreign that leaves my throat feeling scratchy. I found it in her dresser one day, when I was poking around her old room and trying to remember what she was like.

  Once I saw Grammy walking up to the third floor with a box, I guess to pack up some of Mom’s things. But once she got to the top of the stairs, she turned around and walked away without even opening the door. Before she went outside, I saw her wipe her eyes with the end of a dish towel. Then she left “to get some fresh air” and didn’t come back until it was dark. Her eyes were red, and she looked sadder than she’d let herself look for a long time. Grammy’s grief is mostly hidden, though when she does let it show, it’s so intense I worry it’s breaking her open from the inside, like that day when the shell of the hard woman she became was split open to reveal her raw and trembling fleshy core, its messy pink heart.

  I slip out of Mom’s room only when I hear Grammy slam the door, and Paul’s voice, then the sizzling of food. I go back downstairs. I try to seem sullen when Paul hands me more flowers, yellow carnations, while Grammy beams. Really I’m happy for her, if not for myself. While the widower is interesting in an anthropological way, I don’t want him in my house, dating my grandmother. I want to keep going the way we have been all these years, when it’s just us, both lonely and unattached and floating around the house like ghosts, two people who don’t really belong to anybody, only tenuously belong to each other, our relationship based on little more than misfortune.

  And while sometimes I wonder if she knew if she would still love me, or if Grammy ever even wanted me, our mutual sadness is better than pretending to be a little family, pretending that we both chose this, that in her absence we’re not just drifting, not spending our time together in mutual denial, just waiting for her to return, even though we both know she’s not going to.

  Tonight Grammy’s made more food than the three of us can eat, but I’m starving for something I can’t explain. I try to eat, but it feels like I’m hosting some insatiable hunger inside me that nothing can fill.

  The next morning it’s Monday, and Mondays I always sleep over at Sarah’s while Grammy pulls a late shift arranging the week’s new shipment of flowers—preserving and freezing each pale pink lily, each yellow tulip, so that it’ll stay fresh for the rest of the week.

  I wash and brush my hair. I line my eyes with an eyeliner that I burned the tip of with a cigarette lighter, wing the liner so my eyes are all catlike and obsidian, like those jet-black rocks I sometimes find by the river, the ones that used to be chiseled into arrows or knives. The more popular boys carve theirs into arrowheads and loop twine through the hole, wear them like necklaces, and in the summer when the rocks catch the sun and get hot, it burns their skin, but they keep them on, don’t take them off until the necklaces themselves break, leaving behind a triangle of pale skin in the place the arrowhead was.

  In the mirror I look mythic. Like I could be on TV with Mom. I look like the girl who played a young Orpheus before he died. So in love. But also, so tragic. Grammy couldn’t tell that the actor was gay, but I could. Being queer gives you some kind of insight into other queers. I can sense them in my presence like the gods in the myths could find other deities, like Jean did with me that day at church camp. A sixth sense almost.

  I put on the red baby doll top with “Girl Power!” printed on it, one of the long purple peasant skirts with mirrors stitched into them that Grammy keeps buying for me. She thinks that if she keeps forcing me to wear ladylike clothes, then the parts of me that are like my mom that she sees growing inside of me will disappear. Like she can flatten them out the same way she presses corsages between two sheets of plastic to preserve the flowers after they’ve been used and discarded. She lays them out in little glass boxes and gives them back to their original owners for a price. Sometimes, at other girls’ houses, I’ll see the boxes displayed on their mantels or dressers, and I’ll think of her on all those early mornings, trying to save those girls’ memories so that they don’t have to worry about trying to hold onto them themselves.

  Grammy is already gone. I burn the leftover waffles, miss the bus. I think about eating but instead drink yesterday’s coffee, so thick it tastes like dirt. It leaves a greasy residue in my throat that I know I will prod for the rest of the day. I walk to school with the bitter aftertaste still on my tongue.

  Rosie is the first person I see when I arrive. I feel a twinge of fear when I realize she still won’t look at me. She’s smacking her Bubblicious, and it makes a sugary congealed sound as it hits her gums. Her feathered blonde hair has been scraped into a too-tight ponytail, and she’s wearing a pair of the hot pink bedazzled cowboy boots that all the cheerleaders bought after making the squad. I can feel her eye
s burning into the back of my neck when I turn away.

  Everything the popular girls wear is coated in a thin layer of plastic or glitter, like a drugstore candy. Sometimes I think that the girls themselves are made out of plastic. All the popular girls have blonde highlights like streaks of snow or butter. While the color of the highlights changes depending on the girl, they’re all done with the same hair dye at the same sleepovers. They wear frosty blue eyeshadow and either the bubblegum pink Lancôme Juicy Tubes or MAC’s brick-red Lipglass. They have names like Helenie or Pandora. The most popular calls herself Peneloppe, with two p’s. They buy their clothes from Delia’s catalogs and date only football players.

  Sometimes when I look at these girls, I see both what my mom might have been like and what I could have been, if I wasn’t spending all my waking hours worrying that I was walking wrong, that I looked at another girl in the hall for too long, that no matter how hard I try to hide it, they can tell anyway, that they’ll still find out somehow. My first day of school, I tried to talk to the more popular girls, thought that maybe if they inducted me into their clique, then I could pass through school safely without much questioning: their approval would be the only thing I’d need to stay hidden, to keep anyone from thinking too much for too long about me. But it didn’t work, and when I sat down next to them during lunch, they all got up from the table and left, leaving me alone and crimson-faced as the whole cafeteria watched.

  Sometimes I wonder how it will happen, if one day I’ll be found with another girl, or if it will be a quieter kind of outing. If maybe I’ll look at a girl and flush too red, if it will be because I rejected another boy, never went on a single date. Maybe it will be the way I move, because I can’t make my hips swing the same way as the straight girls can. Maybe they’ll just be able to tell that everything I wear, the makeup and hairstyles and dresses, is a costume because of how stiff I feel inside the identity that’s been chosen for me. Or maybe one day someone here will look at me and just know and that will be it.

  The girls rim their eyes with blue, and their lips are like melting Popsicles; their makeup is always both overlined and almost imperceptibly skewed. I think of Paul as I watch them, imagining that this is the way he probably watches those birds when he goes hunting: hungry, but distant. I used to try to talk like the girls here, to swing my hips when I walked, sneak menthols behind the bleachers and drink soda from crinkled cans. To feel something toward the football players who always seem to be getting cheerleaders like my mom pregnant. But the act inevitably fell flat. So now I try to stay relatively unknown, to not speak too loudly in class or do anything that could call attention to me and my secret.

  I feel like a criminal, almost. Despite everything I do, I wonder if they still know when I pass them in the halls. Know about the desire that I sometimes think is slowly eating me alive. Or about Sarah and me. All that kissing. Or about me and Jean. This constant paranoia comes with being closeted in a town so small everyone spends too much time trying to find out everyone else’s secrets just so they don’t expire of boredom. It sounds crazy, but nothing’s safe.

  I wonder what Rosie is thinking as she blows bubble after bubble.

  At Rosie’s fifteenth birthday party, I slipped. Madonna had just kissed Britney on TV and the girls were all talking about it. Rosie couldn’t keep the disgust out of her voice; her mouth got all screwed up just from thinking of the brief spectacle of that kiss, the silence that came over the crowd when their lips met. We were all in her living room, holding melting glasses of root beer floats, and she leaned in close to me, her mouth inches away from mine, and reflexively I closed my eyes.

  Immediately I realized my mistake and jerked away from her, said in a voice that I knew wasn’t convincing, “It’s disgusting; they should be ashamed.”

  But it was too late and the other girls had all started squealing, “It looked like she was going to kiss her!”

  Panicked, I started talking too fast about how I thought the new quarterback was dreamy, but the incident had left a sour aftertaste, a nagging feeling that just for a second, all those other girls had seen the real me, had seen the girl I had been hiding under layers of glittery blush, beneath long loose dresses with broken pieces of mirrors stitched into the skirt that, when you looked too long at them, reflected back a broken image of yourself: fragments making up the parts of a girl. But after that night, nobody ever mentioned it again.

  After my first class, the coffee is still burning in my throat, so I go to the bathroom to rinse out my mouth with the brownish water. When I look up, three girls are standing behind me. I’ve seen them at church and at different parties, but we’ve never spoken. I know they’re on the cheerleading squad. I know that Lacey’s cousin was one of the girls who disappeared after she was found with another girl at last year’s prom. Now they’re whispering, like the bathroom is a temple and I’m the offering. The tallest of the three steps forward.

  “Raya, right?”

  “Hi.”

  She smiles. “I’m Madison.”

  “I know.”

  Her nails are sharp, short points as they dig into my palms and I try not to wince. The second tallest steps forward. “I’m Sherry, and this is Lacey.” She gestures at the smallest girl.

  Lacey’s braces are coated in bread and what looks like canned green beans. She’s trying to get the food out of her mouth, but it’s making it worse. She looks up, waves. “I like your dress.”

  “Thanks.”

  As I walk out of the bathroom, they whisper to each other. I catch only the word queer. With that word I feel a stab of fear in my stomach, wonder if the only reason they talked to me was because they know what I am too. But then I think maybe I’m just paranoid. Decide to forget about it.

  At lunch I pull apart bits of my PB&J and pretend to be like the other girls with their bright glittery hungers. Like the carnivorous plants from The Botany of the Natural World, the only science book our school will assign because it’s the only one that doesn’t mention evolution. I wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to not have to hide your hunger, to be able to want like those girls do without having to conceal it, without having to practice walking, practice smiling.

  Once I heard about other girls and older women like me. It was a late-night news broadcast: a woman maybe fifty years old, with short hair and a men’s button-down, was talking into a microphone. She was telling the reporter about how her girlfriend had been in a car accident somewhere in Mississippi, how the EMTs wouldn’t let her into the ambulance with her, how, because of that, the woman she loved died alone. The reporter kept fiddling with her wedding ring, and when the woman started crying, she jerked the microphone away. She turned around and started to say something about the campaign for homosexual equality ramping up, but before I got to hear her finish, Grammy jumped up and turned the TV off, muttering about how repugnant it was while I stared at my lap and tried to maintain an expressionless calm.

  Earlier this summer, before the kiss, I saw a commercial for a show called The L Word. Two women were kissing in a white room. One’s shawl slipped off her shoulders and fell to the floor. Then the scene cut to another woman wearing men’s clothes, her hair hanging jagged around her face. She was holding a pale, dark-haired girl in her arms. When they started kissing too, I cleared my throat and then changed the channel. I turned to Sarah, who was sitting next to me on the couch, and I saw something like recognition flit across her face. She said, under her breath, “Beautiful,” and then, so lightly I almost didn’t feel it, she touched my hand. We never talked about it or saw the commercial again. But it gave me a glimmer of hope that beyond Heterosexualandia, beyond Pieria and the straight, flat land of Texas, there was a place for girls like us.

  Sarah might be a preacher’s daughter, but when she’s not in church, she’s all James Dean. Wears her hair in a low bun, baggy men’s pants, button-downs. She’s got a little Y-shaped birthmark under her
bottom lip, and she wears men’s boots.

  She sits down next to me, takes my hand under the table, and runs her fingers over the lines in my palm, which makes me shiver. But I glance up and see that Rosie’s standing by our table and looking at me in a way that makes me realize she’s on to us. I jerk my hand away from Sarah and slide down.

  “Rosie’s staring again,” I whisper.

  She nods, starts talking loudly about boys. Rosie walks away, doesn’t look back at us, so I make the mistake of thinking we’re safe and take her hand again.

  The girls in this school have always reminded me of butterflies, with their bright clothes and their easy desires hatching out of them like wings. Already they’re changing into creatures I will never morph into. In the afternoon light, Sarah looks different. When she turns to look at me, her eyes don’t have their usual edge in them. I wonder if she could love a girl like me, and though I don’t want to let it, I feel hope slowly working its way into my chest.

  Back at Sarah’s house after school, we make out until we hear her mother’s car stalling in the driveway. She whispers, “Let’s wait till tonight.”